--- David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net> wrote: > The fact that I dealt with German as a language learned as an > adolescent, not as a child, may be warping my view here. But it seems > to me that everything about grammar they taught us in English there > was some German equivalent, and then there was about three times that > much *additional* stuff that applied only to German, not to English. But that doesn't count the sh*tloads that you never had to learn as a native speaker of English because native speakers don't get it wrong, but that L2 learners have to learn by study. For example: Give the big blue book to Jane. -- fine Give it to Jane. -- fine Give Jane the big blue book. -- fine Give Jane it. -- WRONG!!! -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail